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From Castine, Mark Salter knows John McCain like no other

Speechwriter Mark Salter helps tell the story of a heroic American life

CASTINE — (NEWS CENTER Maine) -- Growing up in a town along the Mississippi River in Iowa, Mark Salter paid little attention to politics or government. “I worked on a railroad after high school for about four years as a section gang laborer.” He pauses and sighs. “One day I realized it was probably not going to be the most exciting career if I kept working on the railroad, so I decided I’d try college.”

Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., led to an internship at the State Department and a job writing speeches for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1989, Salter went to work for Senator John McCain. Over the next three decades he would become a close friend and indispensable advisor as well as the co-writer of McCain’s seven books. McCain’s generosity—he insisted on putting Salter’s name on each volume and giving him half of every dollar the books earned, an unusually favorable arrangement for a ghostwriter—helped him buy a summer home in Castine, where he now spends four or five months a year.

For most of the last year McCain has been at home in Arizona, fighting brain cancer. What will almost certainly be his last book, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations,” came out in May, and Salter was, as always, the co-writer. The book is vintage McCain, filled with humor, some score-settling, warnings about threats foreign and domestic, and a deep sense of gratitude. “He wanted people to understand how fortunate he considered himself for having been able to devote sixty years of his life to the service of this country,” Salter says. “ ‘I’m the luckiest guy you’ll ever meet’—that’s almost a mantra with him.”

Despite his illness and a prognosis that is not sunny, McCain remains upbeat, perhaps because he’s been through worse ordeals. Salter says that when they were working on their first book and writing about McCain’s harrowing five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, McCain liked to tell stories about the jokes he’d crack to the POW in the cell next to him. “He’s just an exuberant, hopeful, optimistic guy,” Salter says, “even though he’s got a dark sensibility sometimes. I’ve always joked that he’s either most romantic cynic or the most cynical romantic I’ve ever met in my life.

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